New Enterprise Associates, the global venture capital firm with headquarters in Silicon Valley, confirmed today that it has raised $2.6 billion for NEA 14, its fourteenth venture capital fund. TechCrunch reported it was raising the fund back in May.
NEA is known for raising large funds, but this one takes the cake: It’s easily NEA’s largest ever, and it may well be the largest in venture capital history. The only one that comes close is the $2.56 billion fund that Oak Investment Partners raised for its twelfth fund back in 2006 — but that was arguably not quite a venture capital round (Oak’s investments are wider ranging) and also not quite as large as what NEA has raised.
Either way, it’s a whole lot of money.
New Enterprise Associates partner Tony Florence told me in an interview today that while the new money is certainly plentiful, NEA’s focus in deploying it will stay pretty steady. “From a sector perspective we will continue to be very enterprise-focused, but also very very active in the consumer internet space, where there are certainly some newer areas of excitement,” he said.
Geographically, NEA is branching out in a cautious manner as well, Florence said. “We’ve been very active in India and China for over a decade, and we’re interested in investing across a lot of different geographies. Brazil is very interesting to us, other parts of Southeast Asia [beyond India] are interesting to us. There are a lot of exciting economies that are really ripe from our perspective.”